U.K. Lawmakers Slam Galileo Project, as Governments Seek Funding Solution
“The jury is out on the continued rationale for Galileo,” the U.K. Commons Transport Committee said Monday in a scathing report on the embattled EU satellite navigation system. No final decision should be made without a realistic cost-benefit analysis, the panel said. MPs urged the government to do everything it can to avoid being railroaded into premature action. Meanwhile, finance ministers Tuesday rejected Germany’s plea for Galileo to be funded by larger national contributions to the European Space Agency, the Associated Press reported.
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The European Commission (EC) has proposed funding Galileo’s construction and launch entirely with 2.4 billion euros in public money now set aside for agricultural subsidies (CD Sept 20 p13). The European Parliament last month strongly backed the plan, saying the project could fail without proper funding. But some countries, notably Germany and the U.K., have balked at the proposal.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her government and France want to present detailed plans for financing Galileo, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported. “We agreed to not push back indefinitely” questions about the project, Merkel is quoted as saying. She and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said they would ask transport ministers to come up with concrete proposals for the council of transport ministers’ meeting in mid-December, AFP reported.
U.K. lawmakers said they fear British opposition to the funding plan won’t matter. The government “does not have many options at its disposal” to counter a vote by a qualified majority of transport, economic and finance ministers to go ahead with the EC plan, the parliamentary panel said. The worst-case scenario would be to end up with a solution that’s unacceptable to the U.K., “forced through with unseemly haste and poor justification, but which British taxpayers nonetheless have to fund to the tune of several hundred million pounds,” it said.
Lawmakers listed several key concerns about Galileo. Estimated costs have increased at every stage of the system’s history, they said, and there’s no reason to believe that even the massive costs now projected for the program bear any relationship to the likely out-turn, they said.
There’s no doubt that if completed, Galileo could offer a range of benefits, MPs said. However, those projected by the EC appear fanciful and have been thrown out mostly to influence decision-making by the Council and EP, they said. They pressed the government to continue to insist on up-to- date benefit evaluations. Moreover, they said, no one has calculated the effect on Galileo’s projected revenue of the five-year delay to the program’s rollout.
The proposal to re-open Europe’s 2007-2013 funding plan to support Galileo make “a mockery of the complex process of negotiations and compromises” underlying the financial planning, the committee said. Re-prioritizing funds to pay for Galileo will decrease monies available for other measures needed to boost competitiveness, growth and jobs, it said. An ideal solution to the “fine mess in which the Galileo program is currently mired” doesn’t exist, and budget discipline should not be jettisoned to save one flagship project, lawmakers said.
Scrapping Galileo may be the best solution, and the government shouldn’t resist that conclusion if that’s where the evidence leads, the panel said. It urged the government to lobby for the necessary information needed for a sound judgment, and accused the EU of creating an “atmosphere that does not allow the continued rationale for the full Galileo program to be questioned.”
British taxpayers will bear around 17 percent of Galileo’s cost, so the Parliament should have the right to debate developments before a final decision is made, the panel said.